Thesis 67

Everyware is an immediate issue because it will appear to be a commercially reasonable thing to attempt in the near term.

If Octopus isn't a sufficiently robust instance of real-world everyware for you, perhaps you'll be more impressed by what's happening along the Incheon waterfront, some 40 miles southwest of Seoul. Rising from the sea here are 1,500 acres of newly reclaimed land destined to become South Korea's "ubiquitous city," New Songdo.

New Songdo is being designed, literally from the ground up, as a test bed for the fullest possible evocation of ubiquitous technology in everyday life. Like a living catalogue of all the schemes we've spent the last hundred-and-some pages discussing, it will be a place where tossing a used soda can into a recycling bin will result in a credit showing up in your bank accountwhere a single smartcard will take you from bus to library to bar after work, and straight through your front door. In fact, almost every scenario we've covered is reflected somewhere or another in New Songdo's marketing materials; the developers have even included the pressure-sensitive flooring for the homes of older residents, where it's once again touted as being able to detect falls and summon assistance. It's quite a comprehensiveand audaciousvision.

And while it certainly sounds like something out of AT&T's infamously techno-utopian "you Will" commercials of the early 1990s, New Songdo is entirely real. It's being built right now, at a cost estimated to be somewhere north of $15 billion.

That financing for the project is being provided by international institutions like ABN Amro, as well as Korean heavyweights Kookmin Bank and Woori Bank, should tell us something. It doesn't even particularly matter whether few of the "enhancements" planned for this or other East Asian "u-cities" pan out entirely as envisioned; it's sufficient that hardheaded, profit-driven businesspeople think there's a reasonable chance of seeing a return on their investment in everyware to lend the notion commercial credibility.

Of course, New Songdo's planners present it to the world as more than just smart floors and RFID-scanning trash cans. It's being promoted as a 21st century trade portal, an English-speaking "Free Economic Zone" richly supplied with multimodal transportation links to the Incheon seaport and the international airport some six miles away. And it's true that banks, even large and savvy ones, have made costly blunders before.

But the fact that such institutions are willing to underwrite a project that places such weight on its ubiquitous underpinnings advances any discussion of the technology to a new and decisive phase. New Songdo isn't about one or two of the prototype systems we've discussed graduating into everyday use; it's something on the order of all of them, all at once, with their performance to spec crucial to the success of a going business concern. This is the most powerful argument yet in favor of rapidly formulating the conventions and standards that might positively affect the way "the u-life" is experienced by the residents of New Songdo and all those who follow.